Brownsville native Carlos Cisneros was 6 years old when he watched doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center save his mother’s life. By the time he was in middle school he knew that he, too, wanted to be a physician.
Cisneros, a May graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, started medical school this month at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. On Saturday he will be among the 55 members of the UTRGV School of Medicine Class of 2025 who will be honored in a White Coat Ceremony at 10 a.m. in Edinburg.
The White Coat Ceremony is an honored tradition in which the School of Medicine welcomes students as colleagues dedicated to patient care. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Julie A. Freischlag, chief executive officer of Wake Forest Baptist Health and dean of the Wake Forest School of Medicine.
It will be the first such ceremony for Dr. Michael B. Hocker, who recently became dean of the UTRGV School of Medicine.
For Cisneros the ceremony will mark the beginning of a dream career that he first envisioned as he began to understand the importance of what the physicians at MD Anderson accomplished with his mother, who was diagnosed with leukemia but has been in remission for 16 years
“I decided I wanted to help save lives and keep families together like they did,” he said. “That experience that I have just inspired me to want to be like those physicians.”
Cisneros said during his high school years at Veterans Memorial Early College High School he became even more convinced he wanted medicine as a career while shadowing doctors as part of the medical magnet program.
“I fell even more in love with it at UT-Austin,” where he graduated with a Bachelor of Sciences and Arts in Biology. He said he decided not to take a gap year as originally planned and applied to about 15 medical schools. In March he got a call from UTRGV for an interview. About 2 1/2 months later he learned he had been accepted.
“At that point I knew I was going to be able to start learning for my dream career,” he said. “I’m super excited and honored to be continuing my education back home,” he said.
While he is not sure exactly what specialty he will eventually pursue, he is sure he wants to practice in the Rio Grande Valley and be part of bringing quality specialty care to the Valley.
“For me, I’ve loved science since I was a child, and I have that personal experience as a kid and the desire to help people made me just fall in love with medicine,” he said.
Cisneros is the son of Lynda and Carlos Cisneros Sr.
